Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL (10 page)

“Aye-aye, sir.”

“What would you like to do at the command, Mr. Pfarrer?”

“I’d like to join a platoon, sir.”

“So would I,” the XO said. “So would I.”

I was assigned to the Operations Department, and I would also occasionally work directly for Jon Wallace in a capacity that my fellow junior officers referred to as “the XO’s out basket.” I would start my SEAL career as the lowliest of the low, a headquarters puke. My disappointment was compounded when the Team mustered at quarters that morning. The uniform was PT gear, cool guy–blue sweatsuits emblazoned with the individual’s operator number and “ST-4.” I was the only person in the formation wearing a uniform, and dress blues at that. After mustering the platoons, the XO introduced me as a freshly minted ensign, just checking aboard from BUD/S. He smirked and said that he hoped the Team would make me feel welcome. They did.

I was grabbed by about fifteen very athletic individuals and carried bodily to the dip tank, half of a jet-engine packing canister filled with water and used to check diving rigs for leaks. I struggled, but someone in the crowd reached out and calmly grabbed me by the scrotum. They twisted hard, and I calmed down pronto. I’d had my first lesson in SEAL Team hostage handling. They threw me in, and I broke through a quarter inch of ice as I splashed under. My hat had come off during the struggle, and as I surfaced, sputtering, the biggest dude I’d ever seen in my life tossed my cover in after me. Six-five, maybe 250 pounds of muscle, “Baby Zee” was the leading petty officer of the Training Department. He looked like a cross between Conan the Barbarian and the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

“Welcome aboard, sir,” he said.

I dripped through the supply building and was issued uniforms and kit. The chief petty officer behind the cage hardly gave me a look as I signed for my equipment, web gear, ammo pouches, backpacks, wet suits, masks, swim fins, and all the other goodies that would eventually make me a frogman. Although I was not yet assigned to a platoon, I was issued PT gear with my operator number, 156. I marked it proudly on my gear, the numbers 156 used instead of my name to demark my equipment and the front of my locker. I felt an odd, simple delight to finally own a number.

As I stuffed gear into my locker, I was reunited with Rick James, my classmate from 114. Rick had missed out on the paper chase I’d gone through after graduation, and reported directly to the team. Having previously served as a paratrooper, he was spared the ignominy of reattending jump school. Also among the wardroom was Frank “Giff” Giffland, who was class leader of 113, the BUD/S class graduating immediately before ours. Frank had been my neighbor in the BOQ back in Coronado, and we were friends. Rick and Frank looked at the puddle dripping from my best uniform. I was relieved to hear that their welcomes had been identical to mine.

In the regular navy, sailors do not generally grab officers and shove them into dip tanks. It happens even less often with the executive officer watching and grinning. The Team’s welcome was a message. We were officers, but we were FNGs, bananas, and we would be treated as nonentities until we proved that we deserved better. The community of naval special warfare was a meritocracy. We who were expected to lead would have to prove that we were worth following. We were all keenly aware that we were not yet SEALs; we were on probation, and if we failed to measure up, we would be gone.

I settled into my job, mostly paperwork, and I was soon able to carry out routine tasks with intense supervision. Working with me in the ops shop was Master Chief Mike Boynton, a gentle bear of a man, and he treated me with the patience of a saint. This particular saint had a stack of ribbons that stretched from Little Creek all the way to the Mekong River: Bronze Stars, Purple Hearts, and a Silver Star, all piled on top of a couple of drawers of campaign medals and unit citations. The crowning glory of his decorations was a gold Special Warfare Badge—the true object of my lust.

One day the master chief caught me gawking at his ribbons.

“Quit eye-fucking me, sir,” he said.

I did my best to ride along on every training evolution leaving the compound, and Master Chief Boynton graciously covered my ass by doing my paperwork, often putting in extra time to allow me to get out and operate. I tagged along with platoons as they conducted sneak attack and swimmer operations in Little Creek Cove. I took diving supervisor training, became a rappel and fast-rope master, demolition supervisor, swam beach recons, and learned the art and craft of cartography. I did everything I could to get out from behind the desk, and it was the master chief who made that possible.

Many of the training cadre, like Master Chief Boynton, were high-time Vietnam operators, men who had fought in the Rug Sat Special Zone and the Mekong Delta, and from these men we learned skills and tricks small and large. There were new equations to master, not just the mathematics of demolition problems or the mixture of breathing gases in closed-circuit diving rigs. The cadre taught us that SEALs operate in a different polarity, in a different ethos, and in a different world. SEALs embrace what other people fear. Operators seek out bad terrain, shitty weather, and big-sea states. SEALs occupy the margins, ecological niches abandoned by humans: hard jungle, glacier, swamp, desert, blue water, and the surf zone.

In the course of my first months at the Team, night would become day and day would become night. Complex evolutions would first be practiced in daylight, but we operated almost exclusively at night. In darkness things were done by touch, by feel, and by instinct honed in hundreds of missions, operations, insertions, and extractions. The cadre taught how to “see” at night, looking around objects and not directly at them, maximizing our eyes’ natural concentrations of rods, the structures in our eyes best able to process contrast. Moonlight became, for us, broad daylight. The darkness was not just a shield and cloak, the night became our sovereign territory.

“Fear the darkness,” Baby Zee used to say, “for I am in it.”

Word up, motherfucker.

Patrols were inserted into the middle of the Great Dismal Swamp, a very aptly named piece of real estate, and made to traverse kilometers of cypress bog, saw grass, and canal. Sometimes we patrolled into the belly of the beast, one platoon against another in a big boys’ game of hide-and-seek. The first team to locate the other would be extracted by helicopter. The losers had to walk out. In the Teams, like at BUD/S, it paid to be a winner. In other exercises, patrols laid up by the side of the intercoastal waterway and counted barge and push-boat traffic, photographing each tow and lighter that passed, noting boat names, registration numbers, type of cargo, visible crew, etc. This data was expected to be presentable immediately on extract, a nontrivial task when you have spent two days immersed in water up to your neck.

Bad weather became good weather; rain, sleet, and cold were our accomplices. Bad weather made the enemy pissy and miserable, and the enemy’s vulnerability was always our strength. We learned to live, hide, and operate in places no one wanted to be. Sometimes when we were extracted by helicopter, I would look down as we flew off over miles of trackless swamp and couldn’t believe that we had been
in
there . . . not just in there, Mom, but in there at
night.

The cadre habituated us to the chaos of combat. In an event called a Monster Mash, operators would run five miles, swim two, emerge from the surf zone, and pair up with a shooting partner. After a brief sprint across beach sand, shooting pairs would run the gauntlet. Alternating hauling each other in a fireman’s carry, the pair would traverse a section of dune laid with det cord (plastic explosive cast into “ropes”), smoke grenades, and half-pound blocks of TNT. As the pair struggled past, the explosives were cranked off within feet of the trail. The close detonations were mind-numbing. The gauntlet was followed by a quarter-mile dash to the rifle range, where individual operators would have to assemble an AK-47 rifle, then lock and load and shoot for score at a series of silhouette targets two hundred meters away. Pumped out from the run and swim, jacked up by the explosions and smoke, hitting the targets was at first almost impossible. In all of the training, there was method and purpose. We were being conditioned to overcome fatigue and the not always salutary effects of adrenaline. In my first months at the Team, the days passed like weeks and the weeks passed like days.

One Friday afternoon I pattered back to my desk, dripping in my wet suit, fresh from a water jump off Cape Henry. It was almost quitting time, and I’d left a pile of work on my desk. I got back to find that the master chief had done it all: drafted messages, written memos, forwarded reports. It was work that I had expected would take me all weekend.

“Jesus Christ. Soaking wet. Where have you been, sir?” he asked.

Obviously, I hadn’t been out dancing. “Water drop,” I said. “What happened to the stuff I left on my desk?”

“Fairies got it,” he said. “Officer fairies, ’cause there ain’t no such thing as chief petty officer fairies.” I smiled. The master chief looked at me. “How many jumps is that?” he asked.

“Ten,” I said.

Master Chief Boynton ambled toward me, unsnapping the gold navy wings he wore below his ribbons. “Here,” he said, “you’re gonna be needing some of these.” He handed me his wings. “Before you go gettin’ all misty-eyed, I probably own a hundred pairs of these. They don’t cost very much, so don’t go writing me a thank-you note. I was just gettin’ tired of looking at your nasty-ass army lead wings.” He walked out.

Navy jump wings cost five dollars at the uniform shop. But the gift meant a hell of a lot to me. Mike Boynton was a frogman’s frogman, the corporate knowledge of the team, an
operator.

Mike is gone now, but I still have those wings.

S
ENIOR CHIEF JOHN JAEGER
did not have much use for new guys, and he did not care too much for officers, either. The one thing that annoyed him more than anything else was new-guy officers, and it was into his tender care that we were delivered when we formally started AOT in the spring. It seemed a very SEAL thing to do to assign a man who would not suffer fools as the leading chief of the Training Department. It cannot be said that the senior chief was a patient man. There was an incredible amount to teach us, and he was in a hurry to do so. Training with the senior chief, one always got the impression that this would all be going a lot faster if we weren’t
so fucking stupid.

Senior Chief was a red-faced, thickset man in his early forties. He’d done several tours in Vietnam as an M-60 gunner for SEAL Team One, and he was unapologetic about the fact that he loved war. The senior chief seemed to have a trace of a German accent, although this was not the most peculiar thing about his speech. He had a sort of verbal tic: He constantly used “or so” as an appositive. Any noun or verb was followed by “or so.” He’d say things like “Get your ass over here before I shoot you,
or so.
” Or “Youse guys are dumber than a bag of hammers,
or so.
”

It was rumored that he was born in Germany during World War II, at a Lebensborn camp where SS men impregnated specially selected Aryan Uber-fräuleins. I heard the story that he was adopted after the war and later orphaned by U.S. Army parents. I knew for sure only that he grew up in a series of foster homes in the Midwest. Even after I came to know him well, I never asked about his German birth. I mean, really, what do you say to someone? “I heard you were born in a Nazi genetic experiment”?

Physically, the senior chief did not make much of an impression, but in the field he was tireless. He operated on about ten hours of sleep a week, and he made a point of winning the command’s weekly two-mile swim. To the chagrin of many of our triathletes, John Jaeger usually crossed the finish line first, rolling onto his back, kicking his flippers, and smoking a cigarette he’d pull out of a plastic bag in his wet suit. If anyone dared to criticize his smoking, John would hold forth on nuclear war: “When the apocalypse comes, there’s gonna be nothing but smoke and dust. All you granola-eating, nonsmoking motherfuckers are gonna be coughing, wheezing, and whining while I take over what’s left,
or so.
”

I never doubted him for a second.

I first met the senior chief after a parachute drop into Fort A. P. Hill, a sprawling army preserve in central Virginia. The place was vast, hundreds of square miles of artillery ranges, woodland, marshland, lakes, streams, and hills. We’d parachuted in with full field gear, weapons, and ammo. On the drop zone we were met by Baby Zee and a few of the other training petty officers. We were not told where the SEAL camp was located; this being our first training deployment, we had no way of even guessing. We were each handed an eight-digit grid coordinate. The cadre told us that at our coordinates we would each find an ammunition can. In the can would be a second eight-digit grid coordinate. These coordinates would lead us to the SEAL camp. Some people were sent to road junctions, some to hilltops. Some were sent north and some south. I looked at my map and plotted my first coordinate. It was in the middle of a swamp. That swamp was six kilometers from where I now stood. Humping my pack and rifle, I took out over the hills.

Our navigation was to be conducted by handheld compass only, no GPS. The ammunition cans for which we searched were each about the size of a fat lady’s pocketbook. They were painted green. The woods were green. Everything was green, and my can was hidden in a bog. When I got there, the swamp was green, too. Still, I had always prided myself on my navigational skills, and I was confident I’d find my cans. I counted my paces, followed contour lines, and walked a magnetic bearing straight through a waist-deep morass. I located can number one directly on my route of march, hanging from a cypress tree. I opened the lid and found the slip of paper with my next set of coordinates. They were at a road junction to the east—four clicks back the way I had just come.